Cyber hygiene concepts for nursing education.

BACKGROUND: The healthcare industry has increasingly been targeted by cybercrime putting patients, organizations, and employees at risk for financial loss and breach of privacy. Malware events compromise system integrity and patient privacy which could lead to delays in treatment, loss of patient data, inability to provide care, and increase in patient harm. In addition, these attacks may also compromise private and personal information for those targeted. OBJECTIVE: Nurses represent a large portion of frontline healthcare workers and are uniquely positioned to help prevent cyber-attacks. Nursing curriculum should include education about the risks to patient safety from cybercrime and the nurse's role in preventing cybercrime. Nursing education has focused on hygiene for patient safety. Adding cyber hygiene to the essential practices of pre-licensure and advanced practice nurses is a first step to protecting patients, organizations, and employees from the repercussions of a healthcare cyber-attack.

Pandemic Crisis: Simulation Contingency Plans.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the typical delivery of nursing education. Multifactorial issues related to the pandemic and clinical placements have forced nurse educators to employ innovative strategies for content delivery. METHODS: This article is an accounting of a simulation team response to the move to all remote or virtual simulated learning experiences over a two-week period and lessons learned on how to move forward with simulated learning contingency plans. RESULTS: Learning outcomes were achieved via the delivery of online commercial and faculty made experiences to simulate clinical practice. Simple and easy to use guides assisted both students and faculty for a positive experience. CONCLUSION: Creating a detailed formal contingency plan for emergencies is essential for nursing programs. Additionally, the pandemic highlighted the importance of continuing faculty development and education in online, virtual, and simulation pedagogy. Finally, it is recommended that schools of nursing implement formal policies for replacement of clinical hours with simulation.

Supporting the Quality of Measurement and Evaluation in Education.

The impetus for the development of a measurement and evaluation team for Robert Morris University, School of Nursing and Health Sciences (SNHS), was to foster faculty and administration commitment in enhancing the quality of measurement and evaluation processes. Many of the SNHS faculty members had experienced incidents of academic inconsistencies with student exam protocols. The measurement and evaluation team was charged to define the goals for faculty to use evidence-based assessment and evaluation strategies that are appropriate for the learner and learning goals, support use of evaluation data to measure the achievement of designated outcomes, and promote curricular excellence through the use of assessment and evaluation data and policies to enhance the teaching and learning process. This paper examines the results of surveys of undergraduate students, proctors, and faculty within the SNHS regarding new exam protocols, the implementation of the protocols, and their success.

Polistes metricus queens exhibit personality variation and behavioral syndromes.

Consistent differences in behavior between individuals, otherwise known as animal personalities, have become a staple in behavioral ecology due to their ability to explain a wide range of phenomena. Social organisms are especially serviceable to animal personality techniques because they can be used to explore behavioral variation at both the individual and group level. Despite the success of personality research in social organisms generally, and social Hymenoptera in particular, social wasps (Vespidae) have received little to no attention in the personality literature. In the present study, we test Polistes metricus (Vespidae; Polistinae) paper wasp queens for the presence of repeatable variation in, and correlations ("behavioral syndromes") between, several commonly used personality metrics: boldness, aggressiveness, exploration, and activity. Our results indicate that P. metricus queens exhibit personalities for all measured traits and correlations between different behavioral measures. Given that paper wasps have served as a model organism for a wide range of phenomena such as kin selection, dominance hierarchies, mate choice, facial recognition, social parasitism, and chemical recognition, we hope that our results will motivate researchers to explore whether, or to what degree, queen personality is important in their research programs.

Back to Fundamentals: Using High- and Low-Fidelity Simulation to Provide Reinforcement of Preventative Measures for Sepsis.

Health care-associated infections result in a staggering number of preventable patient deaths per year. Numerous point-of-practice initiatives and action plans have been implemented, requiring ongoing and continuing education for practicing clinicians. Equally important is the implementation of prevention practices and protocols throughout programs responsible for preparing health care providers. The use of simulation as an experiential form of learning is effective in nursing education as fundamental concepts and best practices in sepsis prevention are repeated and reinforced.

Persistent social interactions beget more pronounced personalities in a desert-dwelling social spider.

The social niche specialization hypothesis predicts that repeated social interactions will generate social niches within groups, thereby promoting consistent individual differences in behaviour. Current support for this hypothesis is mixed, probably because the importance of social niches is dependent upon the ecology of the species. We test whether repeated interactions among group mates generate consistent individual differences in boldness in the social spider, Stegodyphus dumicola. In support of the social niche specialization hypothesis, we found that consistent individual differences in boldness increased with longer group tenure. Interestingly, these differences took longer to appear than in previous work suggesting this species needs more persistent social interactions to shape its behaviour. Recently disturbed colonies were shyer than older colonies, possibly reflecting differences in predation risk. Our study emphasizes the importance of the social environment in generating animal personalities, but also suggests that the pattern of personality development can depend on subtle differences in species' ecologies.